“Oh Yeah? Make Me Transform!”

 

As a child, I hated having to eat broccoli. The only way I would ingest that foul weed was to put butter, salt, or cheese sauce on it, and even then, I had to be coerced or bribed (“No dessert unless you finish your foul weed broccoli!”) Flash forward to after I had kids of my own, and suddenly no veggie tray is complete without it. Something about attaining adulthood leads one to casually snack on broccoli the same way kids devour potato chips. As odd as that seems, it remains a reality that, with few exceptions, kids have to be forced to eat certain foods that adults find appealing and will not do so absent such force.

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

My regular readers are well aware of one of my favorite bifurcation distinctions, that of processors and performers. In the Project Management realm, the easiest acid test here is:

• Processors are devoted to process, and consider a PM effort to be successful if the project team has scrupulously followed all of the organization’s procedures and guidance on how Project Management ought to be done. They really don’t care much about how the actual project performed, though.
• Performers are the opposite: if the project came in on-time, on-budget (or even early and under-budget), these people will consider the project to be a success, and whether or not they followed official guidance is pretty much a non-factor.

With this distinction in place, what is to be said of the typical Project/Program Management Office, particularly since most PMOs are founded in the first place in order to bring some level of transformation to the macro organization in PM space? Sadly, most of these PMOs tend to be staffed by processors. How do I know? Just look at their behaviors. Do they not generate guidance documents, get these documents signed by upper management, and attempt to modify the way the project teams approach and execute their projects by the threatened implication that, by failing to obey every aspect of the dopey guidance documents, the project teams are disobeying upper management (and, therefore, should not get dessert)?

It could be worse.

And if you think this particular strategy is both invalid and highly off-putting, consider all of the organizations that crank out their own versions of how PM ought to be performed, but have nothing at all to do with your specific team or company. To engage in a massive bit of understatement, projects are different. The same team putting together, say, a petaflop-capable supercomputer will employ techniques and management strategies that are so unique to that scope that virtually any generalization about how projects ought to be managed will include at least a couple of strictures that not only fail the relevancy test, but would be profoundly backwards. But you can bet that some processor somewhere on the list of “stakeholders” that “must be engaged” will cite the extraneous requirement as proof that the supercomputer team is doing something wrong, and ought to be chastised (at least) for pursuing their scope in such a way that the processor finds insufficient.

But back to the PMO charged with transforming the macro organization. If the processors’ efforts at compelling transformation via procedures and guidance can be safely assumed to be irksomely coercive less than optimal, what would be the alternative? Put another way, if the processors have it wrong, how would the performers do it?

Performers, in my experience, are more intricately aware of the axiom that Project Managers ought to always begin with the end in mind. Okay, so, what’s the end product here? If you said “transformation of the organization,” you are stilled mired in the processors’ approach. The correct answer here is “to place into the hands of the decision makers accurate, timely, and relevant information that will maximize the odds of their completing their projects successfully.” Such information is gold to the performers, and some suspender-clad, Harry Potter-style-eyeglasses-wearing processor tut-tutting about how all PMs should be forced to ingest and act upon a comparison of the Basis of Estimate to the line items in the General Ledger are anathema to them.

Is there any cheese sauce, or maybe ranch dressing?

This being the case, the optimal approach for the PMO to bring a PM transformation to the macro organization would be for the PMO to offer a variety of Project Management information products to the diverse project teams that would need them. Based on the axiom I wrote about a few weeks ago, these products would reflect the “Quality, affordability, availability: pick any two” reality by making (1) quick-and easy PM information products affordable and readily available, (2) high-level PM information products readily available for a price, AND (3) high-level PM information products at an affordable price, if the project team can wait for them. In this way the various project teams can select the profile that best suits their particular needs, free from the kibitzing of processors, ensconced in their cubicles, turning out their opinions on how everyone else ought to be doing Project Management.

That this performers’ approach to transformational Project Management is patently superior to the typical processors’ strategy is readily revealed with one simple mental exercise. Ask yourself, as the PMO Director, do Team Leaders come to you for PM-typical performance information, or do they seek to have you tell them how they ought to be managing?

Once the project teams begin to freely engage your PMO’s services, just watch, because an actual macro organizational transformation is about to begin. They won’t accept your veggie trays unless they include broccoli…